What Goes Around, Comes Around
by ReidsFanGirl18
Summary: When the brother of an old unsub carries out his revenge, the whole city is in danger... who is he? Who is he really after? The team will have to find the answers before it's too late, but with Reid on the victim side of the equation they'll have to do it without the brains of the outfit. Can they solve this in time without him? how will Reid deal with not helping?
1. Sick

It was dark in the lab that morning, all the blinds on the outside windows were shut tight. After all, if anyone knew what he was doing they would try to foil is mission. They simply wouldn't understand. He had finally done it, it was finished. He'd created his ultimate weapon, soon the whole city would know what had transpired four years earlier, and the FBI would rue the day they imprisoned his brother! He'd managed to create a hybrid between Y-Pestis bacteria and the Spanish Influenza responsible for the pandemic of 1918… Now all he had to do was disburse his creation into the air and let the real work do itself. Soon many would fall ill, perhaps even enough to cause a societal breakdown, and many would die before the doctors realized how to save them… the government could stop tripping over its own ego as their lack of preparedness was exposed… They'd see then… Soon they'd all see that his brother and his uncle had been right… He couldn't wait for that day… and he hoped one of those who would fall would be that arrogant, skinny, little twit Dr. Spencer Reid… Oh how he hated him! Oh how he loathed him for what he had done…

He smiled darkly and carefully put the pathogenic powder in a light bulb, then he put the glass treasure in his inside coat pocket, put a protective mask on his head and pulled a hood over it so no one would see it and question what he was up to. Then he left for the park… he took a look around, everywhere he looked there were unsuspecting innocent people… he bothered him to do this to them… he thought about leaving, he thought about going home and trying to find another way to poison that wretch… But then he saw him, there he was… sitting on a stone bench playing chess… The sight was unbearable… there he was, free, happy… while his brother rotted away in maximum security… In a flash of blinded rage he pulled down the mask from under his hood and through the lightbulb as close as he could to the bench Dr. Reid was sitting on without being noticed. Then he stood there and watched as his creation was carried on the wind and slowly wafted toward its intended target along with everyone unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity at this particular time.

36 hours later… Monday Morning

The cool pre-dawn darkness began to fade as the sun rose above the horizon to the east and shed light over the buildings and streets of DC. Soon the light poured through the windows of Spencer Reid's apartment. Red, blue, green, and yellow beams of light fell softly from the stained glass panes that formed the bottom half of his bedroom window and came to rest over the burnt, mustard yellow blanket atop the double bed in the center of the room. Normally, by now, the bed would have been made and vacant, but the covers remained disturbed by the young FBI agent who still rested beneath them. On the bedside table a cellphone buzzed with the primary alarm, which had gone ignored for nearly an hour, and a round antique alarm clock rang with a second wake-up call until, finally, a large, pale hand reached out and shut it off.

He rose to a sitting position and fingered his long, brown, hair out of his eyes before turning to look at the clock. When he did, instead of jumping up and hoping that he wasn't so late as to miss his usual train, as he would have done on any other day, he allowed himself to fall back against the pillows.

Spencer had slept badly, tossing and turning, and waking up constantly, going between hot flashes and feeling half frozen… while at the same time his throat burned and his head pounded. He didn't feel any better now… in fact, if anything, he felt worse. His limbs felt as heavy as boulders and ached in protest with every move he made. So he stayed there laying on the bed. For once in his life he was actually considering staying home from work voluntarily. He was sick, try as he might, it would be pretty hard to hide that fact… He could try… He could go in… and see how it goes…

He managed to roll out of bed and land on his feet; maybe that had been a bad idea… because now the room was spinning, had he just gotten up too fast or rolled when he shouldn't have? Or was he really just so sick that he shouldn't be trying to get up at all?

He checked his phone, Maeve had called him twice. That wasn't surprising, he'd planned to meet her for coffee almost an hour ago. That wasn't going to be pretty… Maeve knew that this wasn't like him. There was no doubt that by now she was worried, perhaps even frantic… she might even be on her way over here to find out what was going on…


	2. Don't Lie to your girlfriend Spencer

**I should mention that this chapter contains a reference to one of my one-shots which explains how Reid and Maeve connected in the first place which the show has only given us little hints about and the real cause of Reid's headaches which has also never been addressed on the TV show... if it confuses you then go through my profile to my CM oneshot threat and read the one labeled "Toxic"**

Reid stumbled over to his dresser and pulled open the second drawer from the top. Suddenly he felt a wave of dizziness overtake him, the room began to tilt, and the glint of the sunlight on the golden drawer handle made his eyes throb… he fell backward, hitting his head and back on the side of the bed, at least it was something soft.

_If I go in like this, Hotch will just have Morgan or JJ bring me home… _he realized… _Might as well save them the trip…and exposure to…whatever this was…_

He got to his feet, more carefully this time. He grabbed his cellphone off the bedside table, sat back down on the bed in case he collapsed or got dizzy again, and pushed his boss's speed dial.

"Hotchner…"

"M-morning Hotch…" He replied, trying desperately to hide how hoarse his voice was getting.

"Reid…what's going on?" Hotch asked.

"Hotch…I'm sorry…but I can't come in today…I really don't feel well..."

"You sound awful…don't think a thing about it… just take care of yourself and get the office out of your head for a while… that's an order…"

"Ok." Reid replied, then hung up.

Now there was another call to make… this one, he found even less pleasant than calling in sick, but it had to be done. He pushed the number eight and Maeve's picture popped up on the tiny screen… he hit send.

He listened carefully as it rang, once…twice…three times… then came the sound of her voice, the one sound he loved more than the sweetest classical music.

"Hello?"

"Maeve?"

"Spencer… where are you? What happened to the mini-date?"

"I know…I'm sorry… I overslept…"

"Overslept? But you never over-sleep… are you alright...?" She asked, now all too aware of the unusually loud, labored sounding breathing she heard on the other end.

"Yes…yes…I'm alright…I'm fine…" he answered nervously.

"You don't sound fine…" she said, obviously unconvinced.

"It…it was just a long night…" he said dismissively, trying to explain away the exhaustion in his voice and the heavy breathing he knew should could hear.

"Spencer don't lie to me… you only ever do when something is really wrong, something you want to protect me from… and you shouldn't because for one it has the opposite effect and secondly you're terrible at it…" She said, mildly frustrated.

"Maeve… Oh alright…fine… I overslept because I barely slept at all last night, it's not the insomnia… I'm sick… I didn't feel very well yesterday and today it's much worse…I called myself in…" he admitted.

Maeve didn't know what to say to that… she was silent for a moment as a whole host of possible causes for this ran through her mind at lightning speed.

Finally, she took a deep and decided on a response.

"So this is pretty bad…isn't it? You've never called yourself in before… to do that it would have to be bad…"

"It's pretty miserable…"

"Are you Ok alone? Should I head that way?"

"What?! No!" He exclaimed, horrified at the very idea of opening the possibility of her getting this from him.

"Are you alright to stay there by yourself? Tell me the truth, because if you're not I'm either coming there to stay with you…or I'm taking you to the hospital…"

"The hospital? That's…a little excessive isn't it?" He replied, his voice was getting hoarser by the minute, he had to get her to stop worrying and soon… because if they were still on the phone and he lost his voice completely there was no way she wouldn't come.

"Oh no, not really. If you shouldn't be alone and you don't want me over there then the hospital is EXACTLY where you should be…"

For a few minutes, all she heard on the other end was him coughing and at that she decided that she was going over there whether he wanted her to or not.

"You do know that there's no way I'm not at least coming to check on you right?" She asked.

"Y-yeah…" he managed to choke out as the coughing fit finally subsided.

"Go…go get a drink… I'll see you in a few…"

"B-bye…" he said, then they hung up almost at the same time.

Reid stumbled to the kitchen sink and filled a small glass of water, then he threw his head back and downed it in one gulp. It hurt to swallow but at least his throat was no-longer so dry.

He walked over to the couch and let himself fall onto it while he waited for Maeve.

When she arrived at his apartment building ten minutes later; she used the trek up the long narrow staircase to his third floor apartment to clear her mind. She knocked on the door, five minutes later, he opened it and let her step across the threshold.

"H-hey…" he said, standing there in faded green sweats, which had once been the same, dark, army green, color as the walls of his apartment, and an equally faded reddish brown bath robe with realistic looking ducks on it. He smiled weakly back at her and stepped back from the door to let her a little further in before shutting it behind them; he stood there for a moment with his back to her, lingering there with his hand on the door, as if he had to steady himself before he turned to face her.

He looked absolutely terrible. He was as pale as a ghost and sweating, his eyes were glassed over and only halfway open. She could tell that every move, every breath, took much more effort than it should have required.

"Spencer…"

"Maeve…" he said hoarsely. "I'm fine…"

She hugged him tightly, leaning in so that she could feel his heartbeat.

"You are so not fine… stop trying to pretend that you are…"

He sighed, realizing that they were so connected that lying to her was effectively impossible and that it was a waste of effort trying. He gave her a small weak squeeze as if to say: _There's no fooling you…is there?_

She squeezed just a little bit tighter. "You feel warm…" she said softly as she let go.

Suddenly Reid felt the light headed fog of dizziness come over him again. He stepped off to the side so that he was well within an arm's reach of the wall, he swayed badly and leaned against it to keep himself upright. He tried to conceal this, but he could tell that Maeve noticed anyway by an obvious look she gave him, concern mixed with frustration…

"Maybe…maybe I'm not so fine…" he conceded.

She nodded and told him without saying a word that she hadn't been fooled for a second into thinking that he was.

"Just, for once in your life, just take it easy…please…"

He nodded. "I will…Maeve… you don't have to stay here with me…" he said as if he had read her mind.

"Oh I'm staying."

"Maeve…" as with much of their communication, he'd said a few sentences with a single word, that's how it was when you knew each other almost better than you knew yourselves. This time he was telling her that he would still prefer that she didn't stay. Not because he didn't want her around or enjoy her company, but because he'd feel even worse if she got this by taking care of him…

"Spencer, I know you… you'll overdo it if I don't… and even if you weren't prone to doing that, I couldn't concentrate on anything anyway…" she said. "I'd be too worried about you, and telling me not to worry isn't going to help because I'm still going to worry no matter what."

He managed to nod even though he was gripped by another coughing fit. He looked up when it finally subsided.

"I'm going to…go lay down…" he said, staggering back toward his unmade bed.

"That's the best idea I've heard all morning…" she said. "By the way, did you…?" she asked.

"Not today yet…no…" he interjected. She nodded.

Maeve knew that he knew exactly what she was talking about without her finishing her sentence. Had he taken his medication yet? It was a secret between the two of them, so far, the fact that he suffered from a rare genetic condition which had to be kept in check at all times, was unknown to his friends and colleagues. It was easily treatable, he didn't feel the effects at all anymore just as long as he kept taking the medication which replaced the all-important chemical his body no-longer made on its own.

She walked into the kitchen where she found the bottle of large pill capsules hidden behind his coffeemaker, she took it out from its hiding place, removed two capsules and replaced the lid. Then she got a plastic glass down from the cupboard above her head and filled it with orange juice she found in the fridge.

She brought them to him, handing him the pills and setting the juice on the bedside table.

He threw his head back, took them, and downed the juice in a single gulp.

"Th-thank you…" he told her.

"You're welcome… you know, you have to be even more careful, even more on top of that when you're sick like this."

"I know…" he whispered in order to hide the fact that he was dangerously close to going temporarily mute.

"Get some rest…" she told him, and for once he slipped easily out of consciousness into a fairly peaceful sleep.

She got a semi-solid gel pack out of the freezer, wrapped it in a wash cloth and laid it across his burning forehead. She smiled, and went out into the living room to let him sleep.

While he slept, she checked on how much food there was in the kitchen and turned on the old-fashioned radio in the living room. She kept the volume low so that it wouldn't wake him up.

_I really hope he'll be ok… I don't like this one bit… something tells me this isn't something he came down with at random… _she thought.


	3. This can't be good

This was fantastic, he'd done it! Ha, soon that asshole would be exactly where he belonged! In the ground! Revenge was his at last, he was sure of it now.

"Soon dear brother…soon I'll make him pay… he'll pay dearly for what he did to you… I promise you that."

At the BAU, JJ and Blake had just arrived.

"Sorry we're late, traffic was insane... have we started round table yet?" they asked.

"No and this looks like it's gonna be a bad one…" Morgan said, pointing up toward Hotch's office.

They looked where he had indicated and saw what Morgan was referring to, the blinds were shut tight as if Hotch didn't want anyone to see who was up there discussing the case with him.

JJ took a good look around…

"Hey, where's Spence? He's never late…"

"You're right, that's weird…" Blake replied.

"Reid's not coming…" Morgan told them.

"What do you mean he's not coming?" JJ asked.

"He called Hotch early this morning… Reid's sick as a dog…he's staying home…" he explained.

"That's not like him…" she commented.

"No it's not…has this ever happened before?" Blake asked.

"Not as long as I've worked with him…" Morgan said. "There've been a few incidents over the years where he got hurt on the job and been out for a little while, but him just callin in sick…that's a new one…"

"Well hopefully it's not that serious…" Blake said.

"I don't like this, if it wasn't serious, if it was no big deal, he'd be here, probably pretend to be completely fine and we'd never know…"

That's when Hotch called everyone to the round table room.

"If you haven't heard already we are a man down for the time being, but we can't let that deter us and it's probably best that we try to leave Reid alone as much as possible…he doesn't need to worry about any of this right now…" Hotch said.

They nodded.

"Now as for the case… Garcia if you would…"

"My pleasure sir…" She said. "Between twelve and seven AM this morning, twenty eight people checked into emergency rooms in and around the district. They were presenting with repertory distress and a high fever… it was determined that they're all suffering from a never before-seen, genetically altered strain of pneumonic plague… They were all at the same park Saturday afternoon between one and four PM so we're pretty sure that's where this unsub released the…stuff…"

"What's the status of the victims?" Blake asked.

"So far there are two dead…one was an elderly woman, the other was a cancer patient who'd just stopped chemo and was celebrating remission… All the victims have been consolidated and moved to a special wing at Pathezda Hospital, the Special Pathogen's Unit of the CDC is in charge over there, I spoke to Dr. Kimura, we've worked with her before, she says that the antibiotics normally used for plague are working, they aren't working as well though and right now no one is sure exactly why. Unfortunately you won't be able to interview any of the victims, this thing is air born so they have everybody in a strict, level three quarantine, whatever that means."

"We need to finish this fast…" Hotch said.

Garcia got a small metal tray off the table with little cups of red liquid.

"This is Streptomycin, everybody needs to take it before we leave…

They each took one and drank it. Then they headed off to the hospital to learn what they could from the doctors.

_This was a dream, it had to be… Reid found himself standing in the lab that had once belonged to Dr. Lawrence Nickels… It was impossible…but at the same time it was so very real. He saw Chad Brown standing beside him. _

_"Why did you have to stop me? I just wanted to show everyone how vulnerable we are… Why can't you understand that?" he asked. _

_"Poisoning people isn't the answer…" Reid replied. _

_"Soon you'll see…soon you'll see that I was right…" _

_"How? You're locked up in maximum security and your creation is in military containment…" _

_"Oh you'll see…" he said menacingly. _

_Reid gave him a questioning look, but before he could ask what Brown meant by that, the dream changed… he was hanging onto the top of a cliff over what had to be either a lake of lava or the mouth of an active volcano. He felt like he was literally on fire, his hand slipped and he fell… _

Reid found himself sitting up in bed, shivering feverishly, his chest heaving, having no idea what on earth had just happened.

"Wha…appened…? Where…where am I?

"Spencer…calm down…relax…it was just a dream." Maeve said softly.

He looked over to see her staring at him with eyes full of worry.

"I was just getting you a new icepack, I didn't mean to wake you…"

He nodded, then turned away and started coughing again.

When it stopped, he turned to face her again.

"Don't worry about me…" She said, understanding perfectly.

Reid allowed himself to fall back against the pillows.

"You're burning up…" she said, placing the new icepack where the old one had been, then she pulled the blanket up where it had been before.


	4. Ok yeah, this is bad

An hour later, Maeve had called for an ambulance, she didn't know what else to do, Spencer was starting to have trouble breathing. What was this? What was happening?

When the paramedics arrived they started him on oxygen before they even got him on the stretcher. Maeve was horrified at the sight of his drenched, limp body and the way his chest heaved as he still fought for each gulp of air.

When she asked to ride in with him they didn't just allow it, they insisted on it.

Once outside, they quickly loaded him in, Maeve jumped in afterward, along with one of the paramedics, and the other one shut both doors and less than a moment later, with sirens blaring, they drove away at what had to be twice the speed limit.

"How long were you with him today?" the paramedic asked.

"Since about 6:45 this morning…" she said.

"How close was our contact?"

"The closest we got was a hug…"

"Did he say when this started? Do you know when his symptoms appeared?"

"He said they started yesterday afternoon…"

"Was he at Liberty Mountain Park on Saturday?"

"I don't know maybe, he goes there to play chess sometimes, what is going on?"

"We have a confirmed outbreak of plague, and his symptoms and the timeline are both consistent, what's more, Liberty Park is where the outbreak started, all the patients were either there on Saturday or spent time with someone who was…"

"Oh my God…"

"We're taking you both to Pathezda Hospital. When we arrive, he'll be taken to directly to a quarantine section of intensive care where he'll be sterilized, stabilized, and started on the antibiotic protocol. You'll hit the bio-safety shower, brought to a quarantine room as well, except in your case it'll be for observation and you'll start the same antibiotics prophylactically…" he explained. Seeing the horrified and mildly confused look on her face he added… "It's the only way to protect you and maximize his chances of recovery…"

For the rest of the ambulance ride, the only break in the silence was the siren and Spencer's god-awful cough… When they arrived, the ambulance backed in through a special entrance in the back, down an indoor corridor a ways. The back door opened and Maeve saw four doctors in red bio-safety suits and realized they'd backed right up onto the entrances of two half-sized clean-up chambers.

She didn't see Spencer after he was put on a different gurney and rolled away, she tried to follow as they scrubbed her down but one of the doctors held her back.

The next thing she knew, she was wearing a set of dusty-blue hospital scrubs and was being walked toward a little room with white walls, white tile floor, a cot with a white bed frame, white sheets, white blankets, a white pillow… it all felt sterile, and cold… She sat on the bed, it wasn't like there was anything else to do…

She was there for about fifteen minutes when a female doctor in her late forties came in carrying a small, clear plastic container of red liquid. She was a short woman, clearly of Asian descent, given away by her olive skin-tone, raven black hair, and slanted coal-black eyes.

"Hello…" she said, giving a small smile of solidarity.

"Hi…who are you…?"

"I'm Dr. Kimura… and this…" she said, holding up the tiny container, "Is your first dose of Streptomycin… you'll have to take one of these every eight hours for the first twenty four, then every day for the next nine days after that…"

"I'll be in here for ten days?!" Maeve exclaimed.

"Oh no… twenty four hours…after that, as long as you're in the clear, you can go…"

"What about Spencer? Will he be ok…?" she asked.

Dr. Kimura sighed heavily. "It's too early to know for sure… but assure you that I will do everything in my power to help him beat this thing…" she promised. "I give you my word."

Maeve nodded sheepishly, shell-shocked and strung out emotionally and mentally at this point. She took the cup and downed the antibiotics.

Dr. Kimura started to say something but stopped herself, nodded, and left.

She then met the BAU in the Lobby.

"Nice to see you all again, though I wish we could meet sometime under better circumstances than this… I remember most of you… Agent Hotchner, Morgan, Rossi, JJ…"

"This is Agent Blake, I believe she's new to you…" Hotch said.

The two women nodded to each other in greeting.

"Agent Reid is not with us at the moment…he's ill and decided to sit this one out…"

"I'm aware of that, he didn't have much of a choice, he just came in as a patient presenting with the same symptoms as all the others less than a half hour ago…"

The entire team shot horrified glances at her and at each other.

"What's his status?" Rossi demanded.

"Stable… he's just started the antibiotics, it'll be over an hour yet before we re-do the blood test to see how he's responding to it…"

"What can you tell us about the strain itself?" Blake asked.

"Now, that's what's weird… we don't have the full genetic breakdown of the bacteria yet, but under a microscope it looks like the strain that mankind has been dealing with for hundreds of years, but it's not behaving like it once it enters the body… the symptoms are consistent, but their appearance in relationship to the timeline is not… There are two main phases to the incubation period, each roughly twenty four hours long… the first stage, you have no idea that you're even coming down with something, you feel completely fine… second phase, you start to feel it somewhat, you feel fatigued, congestion begins to set in, in the throat, and you develop a low-grade fever… but it's not until forty-eight hours after exposure that the buildup sinks into the chest, the cough sets in, and the fever spikes… that's usually when you realize you're in serious trouble… it's also when the victim becomes infectious because the cough is how the bacteria travels from person to person. However, with this strain, the cough is setting in and the fever is rising much earlier, as much as twelve hours before it ordinarily would, even more than twelve hours early if the patient wasn't very healthy to begin with…"


	5. Why?

"But why would someone do that? Why would the mess up the timeline and not just make it so that the antibiotics were useless?" JJ asked.

"Most likely, whoever created this, designed it this way so that the patients would be infectious for a longer amount of time before they sought medical attention… therefore maximizing what we call the R-Knot, the number of people one person is likely to infect… in modern times, with antibiotics and the ability to more absolutely quarantine the sick, the R-Knot of an infection like plague, in which the person knows they need help, almost simultaneously with entering a contagious state, is relatively low… the person who made this has found a way to maximize it…"

"Well, no doubt we're looking for a scientist…" Rossi said.

"But is he trying to maximize the number of victims because he wants the highest body count…or his he after someone specific and wants to make absolutely sure he gets them?"

"It's been almost forty hours and there hasn't been another attack, if he wanted as many victims as he could get then he would have struck again by now…" JJ pointed out.

"If that's the case, it's also a forensic counter measure… the more people he infects… the more his actual intended victim becomes a needle in a haystack…" Hotch pointed out.

"The fact that he hasn't attacked again also tells us something else…" Morgan began. "It shows us that whoever his primary target was, they've already been infected, they or someone they spend a lot of time with was probably at that park Saturday, we need to start with the victims who were there. Directly, or indirectly, they'll lead us to him…"

Meanwhile, Maeve was pacing up and down the length of what she now thought of as a holding cell.

The not knowing, the waiting, the not being allowed to help in any way even though she had a PhD in genetics and a general MD, was excruciatingly frustrating.

She wondered how Spencer was doing, were the antibiotics helping? Would he be alright? Had the doctors on his case actually read his file? Were they aware of his history? She hated the thought of what would happen if they hadn't and he was here for more than a few days tops.

A year and a half previously, he'd contacted her for help… he'd been suffering increasingly painful migraines for months with no one being able to give him a clear answer as to their cause or how to make them stop.

What the symptoms, timeline, and his family history, had made her suspect, and what his DNA later revealed… was that almost three years ago his body had taken orders from his DNA to destroy a crucial neuro link between the hypothalamus and a set of glands just outside the brain, which had been the rout of the signal to produce the all-important chemical they made. It acted as a control mechanism, making sure that the brain, except perhaps on occasions too extreme to fix, never destroyed itself by pushing against the brain case. It controlled swelling and repaired concussions… but three years ago, Spencer's body had suddenly stopped making it because the signal was no longer reaching its destination.

Thus he needed to take its synthetic counterpart, and would need it for the rest of his life.

She wished it was something that could have been fixed on a more permanent basis without the need to constantly maintain it, but nevertheless it had brought them together and she was grateful for the fact.

Yet she knew that how long he could go without it, without the symptoms coming back, (which she was pretty sure was the absolute last thing he needed right now), could change based on how much of it his body needed to use… infection, of any kind, was a big fat aggravator that would crop that grace period from over two weeks to less than one…

She resolved to make sure she was not infected, and even if she was, somehow beat it before it reared its ugly head so that she could escape this hell hole and make sure the doctors were aware of it.

She laid down on the bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering how she could've missed it… how she hadn't seen what had been right in front of her… she should've gotten him here hours ago, she knew that now… then again, even he hadn't realized the full gravity of his situation… he'd had a sense that it was serious, the kind of thing, that although she hadn't let him, he'd wanted to protect her from…

There had been a time, not very long ago, when he'd saved her life… When he'd arrived, with the team in toe to bring down the woman who had stalked her for ten months… He'd risked his life to get her out of there… she had no regrets about, apparently, having risked her own life to take care of him when he needed it. She just wished she'd done a better job of it.

In a visitor's lounge not far away, the rest of the BAU was trying to work out the Unsub's profile.

"Ok, we know that the Unsub's intended target is probably someone who was at the park two days ago…the problem is that's almost all of the victims…"

"We need to figure out what the stressor was for the Unsub…" Blake said.

"Well let's look at his MO, the strain was genetically altered, so we're looking for someone with a background in science, and the guy used light bulbs as a dispersal method, that's interesting because we've seen it before, the question is, is that a coincidence or a connection?"

"If it is a connection, we're looking for someone who is either one of us, or who was connected to either Chad Brown or Lawrence Nickels… that was a classified case…" JJ reminded everyone.

"We should have Garcia see what she can find of their family and associates, I know we did that four years ago but with Nickels dead and Brown in prison, we have to look at their social circles with new eyes…"


	6. The Unsub Identified, How is Reid?

Morgan dialed Garcia's number.

"Hey Babygirl, we need ya to work some magic for us."

"And how? My prince, may I be of service?" She asked.

"We need you to look up people connected with Chad Brown and Lawrence Nickels…friends, relatives, co-workers, anybody…"

"Brown and Nickels? The Unsubs from the anthrax case four years ago?"

"They would be the ones…"

"But Nickels is dead and Brown is in maximum security federal prison…"

"Yeah I know, but the Unsub is copying way to much of Brown's MO for it to be a coincidence, were thinking whoever's doing this now is either trying to carry on what Brown started or trying to get back at the people who put him away, possibly both…"

"Ok, Brown's sister effectively disowned him long before the incident four years ago so it's probably not her… he does however have a half-brother… Finn Gorman… He's thirty-two years old, a loner, never married… actually, looks like the only person this guy was ever close to was his brother… He also has not one but two PhDs, the first is in biomedical engineering and the other… is in genetics…"

"What were his thesis papers about Garcia? Does anything stand out there to say that he agreed with his brother's views?"

"The engineering paper was about the types of things that could be achieved through DNA manipulation, focusing on the ease of turning certain diseases into antibiotic resistant WMDs… and the genetics one… let's see, here we go… on the presence of viral DNA in the human genome…"

"That's him…" Morgan said

"Totally… he testified at Chad's trial… basically said that his brother was right about everything… basically he thinks that what his brother did four years ago shouldn't have been considered a crime…"

"Thanks Garcia…"

"You're welcome my love…"

Dr. Kimura went in to check on Reid. The area he was in, was a collection of specialized rooms with negative pressure chambers outside the doors, and windows out into little rooms where family and friends could look in through the glass. In the room itself, specialized lights that killed bacteria with the UV they gave off shown down from the ceiling. Reid was laying in a hospital bed in the center of the room, backed up against the south wall. When she came up to him he was asleep. His breathing was raspy, and shallow, but thanks to the oxygen he'd been getting since the ambulance brought him here, he was at least no-longer struggling for air.

She stuck a thermometer in his ear, it read out at 104.5 degrees, higher than when he'd arrived. She sighed, shook her head and proceeded to do what she had come to do. She replaced the IV bag carrying the life-saving antibiotics, drew a sample for the second blood test, and took an X-ray so they could get a better idea of the shape his lungs were in.

The results were mixed, When she put the film up on the back-lit screen in her office ten minutes later, the X-ray showed sever pneumonia, if it got too much worse, they'd have to insert a chest tube to drain the excess fluid from his lungs and chest cavity because at a certain point, which he was already approaching, the oxygen alone wouldn't be enough.

Less than a half hour after that, the lab called her with results that were more promising, the bacteria was beginning to die off, there was already less, not more in his blood stream. The antibiotics were working… at the rate they were going his system would be clear of any detectable amount in approximately forty-eight hours, which was the rate typical in cases of unaltered plague. But combined with the troubling advancement the disease had already made, as shown in the X-ray, Kimura wasn't sure what to make of it… she knew that the antibiotics would clear out the bacteria, but it wouldn't clear out the toxins they released or heal the damage already done… no, it would take weeks for him to recover, and that was if he survived that long, and more than likely, some of the damage would be long term or even permanent… it was such a mess, a race between the bacteria and the antibiotics, the prize was his life.


	7. Where's Finn?

Now that they knew who the Unsub was, the key was finding him and proving what he had done. Garcia had found a home and work address for Finn Brown, but both had been empty, the apartment records had him living in was vacant and set to be bulldozed, the company he had listed as his employer had gone out of business over a year ago, and his cellphone was so old that it didn't have a GPS tracking chip, the only way to pinpoint his location would be to triangulate it when he made a call, which they were sure he wasn't stupid enough to do. So the question was how to find him, Garcia was still looking for a possible secondary location that could have been used as a lab to create his deadly concoction.

While he waited for Garcia to call him back with more news, Morgan stepped into the windowed room just outside of Reid's room in quarantine. He absolutely loathed himself for having not realized that Reid was this sick until after he'd already ended up in the hospital. He'd seen that Reid wasn't quite right, they'd hung out Sunday… He'd noticed that Reid was unusually quiet, that his eyes were open a little narrower than usual…that there had been a pale, flushed look to his skin, but it hadn't dawned on him that what he saw amounted to anything worth worrying about… Reid was a situational insomniac, if things came up that bothered him or got him overly excited, he could go days, weeks, on more than one occasion that Moran knew about, he'd even gone months without a single decent night's sleep… so it had been so easy to explain away the signs that something wasn't right, and pass them off as sleep deprivation, in his mind he'd even made silent jokes to himself about what might have brought it on this time… thinking that maybe things between Reid and Maeve had finally gotten more… well…physical…

He loathed himself now for even entertaining such ideas. Now Reid was possibly dying and Maeve was locked up in a quarantine observation chamber… His best friend was in grave danger and all he could do, was peer in through a window and hope that he would be ok. Morgan hated not being able to help him, but you couldn't kill off the pneumonic plague with a bullet…

On the other side of the glass, Reid laid there in the hospital bed, not having the energy to do much of anything except stare into space and let his mind race and wander as it so often did when he had nothing to do. He wondered how long he'd be in here, where Maeve was now and if she was still alright, he wondered if the team had been told what a mess he was in… he imagined that by now they probably had… and he hated to have worried them like he knew this would. At the same time though, he felt less guilty about having called himself in, instead of sucking it up and coming to work… he had taken a lot for him to do that and he was glad that he knew now he'd made the right choice even if it had felt wrong at the time…

He turned his head to look around the room, when his eyes fell on the window he saw Morgan standing on the other side of it. He waved at him, in response, Reid grimaced as if to say _it looks worse than it is _and raised his arm to wave back.

The two men couldn't hear each other through the glass but he saw Morgan mouth the words _I'm gonna find who did this to you. _

Meanwhile, Maeve was trying to think of a way to escape, the door led right out to a hallway with a lot of foot traffic plus she had noticed earlier that there was an alarm on the door that would sound if she tried to sneak through the door… the room had no windows either because it didn't line up to the outside… so the only way out that she could think of was the air went above her. She stood up on the bed and began to pull at the vent, fortunately the screws were already loose, which can sometimes happen in rooms with negative pressure containment areas on the outside. She managed to jump and squeeze up into it and started to crawl through the air ducks. Now she just had to find Dr. Kimura and tell her about Spencer.


	8. Hanging by a Thread

Reid couldn't even think straight anymore, the lights above him were incredibly painful… his head, which had been pounding for the last twenty four hours now felt like it was being squeezed in a vice and having chisels hammered through it. He knew exactly what this was and it had nothing to do with the plague… He had long known exactly what Maeve had reminded him of this morning… that illness, among other things, would shorten the grace period in which he could go without the medication he'd been secretly taking for the past year, without the symptoms it prevented coming back to haunt him. What he hadn't known, mostly because it was near impossible to predict, was just how much this situation would effect that. How fast the migraines would return… he supposed that it made some measure of sense, the more serious the illness… the quicker he'd need it… and this was inarguably just about the worst he'd ever felt…

He knew that several months after the migraines began almost three years ago, his team had begun to notice that he wasn't himself, he'd even confided in Morgan and Emily about them… but it was Maeve who had finally solved the puzzle and explained why they happened and told him what he had to do to stop them. He had revealed neither their cause, nor the medication that kept them at bay to his team though, they knew only that he no longer suffered from them. Maeve had been being stalked at the time so at first his silence had been to preserve her safety, the less people who knew that he knew how to contact her the better… After her subsequent rescue the previous January, he'd remained silent on the subject of his migraines on an illogical, conditioned, response to preserve his own self-esteem. Being the youngest member of the team he often felt like the others were concerned for him, that they doubted his abilities not as a profiler or agent but that he had the emotional elasticity to deal with what they did and saw. Knowing this and not wanting to give them any real grounding for the idea, he tended to bury everything he believed they would perceive as a weakness.

Though now, now that he desperately needed another dose, he really wished he had trusted the others with his diagnosis….so that someone might direct Dr. Kimura's attention to the notice about it in his file…

Maeve saw Dr. Kimura below her… she unscrewed the vent cover, jimmied it loose and jumped down in front of her.

"Ms. Donovan… you shouldn't be out here…" she said.

"First of all… it's either _Dr. _Donovan…or Maeve…just Maeve. Second, I'm not infected. I feel fine… if you want me to stay on the antibiotics I will, but it's counterproductive to lock me up when I can, and apparently need to be, helping you."

"What do you mean…need to be…?" Kimura asked.

Maeve saw that she held Spencer's chart in her hands, Maeve snatched it away and looked it over for herself, then she opened it in front of Kimura.

"You missed something here, something that's important."

"What did I miss?"

"Have you been checking his cobalt thyonate level?" She asked.

"No…but I'd assume that it would be rather low…plague tends to make the body require a lot more than usual…why?"

"You're right…it probably is low…but more so than you think… Spencer has CH…it's a genetic condition where the body stops producing cobalt thyonate of its own accord. He takes the synthetic on a daily basis to counteract that but trust me…he's in no position to go without it for long…"

"What do you suggest? I let you expose yourself even more than you have already?" Kimura asked.

"No. But let me suit up and go in… I know what the external signs look like, well enough to separate them out… please… If you let it go on too long… it'll weaken him to the point where there's no way that he'll survive this mess… I am begging you!"

"I'm sorry but I can't allow that… But thank you for the information… I will check into that myself…"

"What if it's extremely low?" Maeve asked; and her gut told her that it was. "What if he's in level two or three deprivation? What would you do then?"

"Obviously I'd administer the synthetic through the port medicine line in his arm…"

"No…no… that's no good… you need to inject it right up into the glands themselves. It has to be a straight needle injection and it has to go exactly where its needed…otherwise it'll take too long to reach the brain and too much of it will be metabolized and lost in transit… Let. Me. Do. This."

"Ms. Donovan…"

"Once again, it's DR. Honestly Ma'am, right now I don't give a damn what you want me to do or don't want me to do… the only thing I DO care about is that Spencer gets out of this alive. So either help me make sure of that or go to Hell!" She said sharply. Then she stalked away and cornered a nurse in the next hallway.

The nurse was a pale blond woman with silver gray eyes who looked to be in her early forties… she stared fearfully at Maeve.

"You… I need the equipment necessary to enter a bio-safety level three area, a bottle of liquid Cobalt-Thyrosine, and a syringe with a minimum two-inch needle… Stat. Where is that stuff kept around here?"

The nurse led Maeve to the storage closet outside the quarantine area. In it, Maeve found set of white, bio-safety, over clothes, several boxes of rubber gloves, and rolls of masking tape.

She suited up and used the tape to seal the gap between her sleeves and her gloves. To her surprise, when she looked up she saw that the nurse had brought her the rest of what she had asked for.

"I have no idea what the story is, but do what you need to do…" she said.

Maeve nodded, took the items from her hands and scurried off to wherever they were keeping Spencer.


	9. Up Against a Wall

When she found him, he was laying there with his eyes shut tight, forcefully shut… she'd been right… he was clearly feeling CH again as well as the plague… She pulled a lever on the side of the bed which moved him to an almost upright sitting position, then she came around behind him. She took the bottle and syringe in her hands and filled the syringe up to the correct dosage of the bottle's contents. Then she lifted his hair off the back of his neck, felt for her target, and stuck the needle in… Only when she felt the needle pierce the wall of the gland itself did she push down on the other end of the syringe and force the medicine into it. She felt his whole body tighten up in pain as she did this but there wasn't any real choice. She had to.

_Reid couldn't tell if this was a dream or not. Was he asleep or just out of it? He didn't know. He saw an angel wearing a white hooded robe and a mask. She said something to him but the words didn't register. He could've sworn that it was Maeve's voice he was hearing. But the angel's face was blacked-out from the lights above casting it in shadow. Was he already dead? Is this what heaven was like? He could deal with that… Suddenly she put her hand beneath his neck and lifted his head. She spoke again, but again it didn't register, something about everything being alright. That's when he felt a sharp stab of pain penetrate the daze he was in. He gritted his teeth. _

_When the pain subsided to a dull throb that he didn't have the wherewithal to react to, she gently laid him back down. Then she ran her fingers gently through his hair and kissed his forehead before she left. _

Within minutes, Reid's head began to clear, the throbbing and sharper pains in his head were subsiding and the light was becoming more bearable. He was certain now that he wasn't dead, and that what he'd just experienced hadn't been a dream. That really had been Maeve, she'd saved him yet again…

Meanwhile, the BAU was at Finn Gorman's house.

"Finn Gorman, FBI! We have a warrant for your arrest!" Hotch shouted as he and Blake stood on the front porch. There was no answer, so he broke down the door, and they began to clear the house room by room. But there was no one there on the first or second floor of the house. Every room just had old, floral, wall paper and Victorian-looking furnishings.

Finally they went down to the basement. That's where they found him, he was a small, and yet round man. With black hair and small, beady silver eyes that darted nervously around the room every few seconds.

"Fin Gorman put your hands in the air!" Hotch ordered.

Finn gave a dark, toothy smile that revealed sharp, peg-like teeth. He dropped to his knees and put his hands on the back of his head like a prisoner of war. Morgan stalked over and handcuffed his tightly and harshly yanked him to his feet. Hotch gave him a concerned look.

_I know you're angry about what he did to Reid, but we still don't know exactly how he altered the strain. For all we know, Reid needs us to take him alive. Don't do anything too drastic, even if he deserves it. _

An hour later they had Finn in interrogation, Hotch and Rossi were trying to get a rise out of him. He was clearly a narcissist and if they hit the right chord they knew he'd sing like a canary. They just had to find it.

"Who was your original target Finn? Who are you really after?" Rossi.

"Answer our questions and we'll tell the DA you cooperated." Hotch offered.

"I thought you knew, you know him after all, he helped you stop my brother… he put Chad behind bars…"

"What?" Rossi asked. "Who are you talking about? Give us the name, now!" Rossi already knew exactly who Finn meant, he just didn't want to believe it.

"That little asshole Dr. Spencer Reid. He ruined everything!"

"No. You son of a bitch! Your brother ruined everything when he poisoned innocent people. Don't you DARE blame anyone else for that." Rossi screamed at him.

"You can be angry at me, all you want to… it won't change anything, a day from now, maybe two…your friend will be dead…"

"Ha, I guess you aren't the big-shot scientist you thought you were. The antibiotics are working, which means that 36 hours from how he and everyone else you tried to kill will start to get better…"

"Not if they run out of air first, the medicine might be working but it won't work quickly enough, they'll either suffocate or drown in their one blood and fluid before the antibiotics can clear their systems, and your friend will be no exception…"


	10. The Final 36

***Guys I am SO sorry for taking so long with this last update, I just hit a brick wall with one of the scenes in here and I kept rewriting it over and over, I REALLY hope you're still out there and I just want to say I really appreciate the views and the feedback. Thanks and Enjoy :)**

They called Kimura immediately. She took a pre-emptive step and put a drainage tube in Reid's chest and drained all the excess that had built up around his lungs. This didn't get rid of what was in his lungs, but it at least relieved the pressure closing in around them, making absolutely certain that his lungs had the room they needed to expand. She also did this with the other remaining survivors. Hopefully, this would combat the problem and secure their supplies of oxygen. It still wasn't a sure thing, but it was all there was left to do. Now all anyone could do for them was wait and hope.

Meanwhile, more and more victims were arriving, so many that the quarantine ward was almost at full capacity, and soon they would have to start putting them in the observation chambers. That however, was the least of their problems. The public was realizing what was going on, psychology of group panic had taken over, people were storming the stores for basic supplies and fighting over cases of water and canned goods. Everyone who stocked up was in a mad dash to get out of town, but there was no where for any of them to go. All the roads in or out were closed off and public transit was down. It was a mess, and every law enforcement officer in the area was needed to deal with it. That included the BAU, there was no time to stop and worry or stew over their hatred and anger at Finn for almost (and still possibly…though none of them would admit it even to themselves…) killing Reid. No, they spent those thirty-six hours trying to quell the mobs of frightened citizens. Some were even trying to rob hospitals of their supplies of antibiotics; psychology of group panic at work.

Before any of them realized it, what seemed like the longest day ever had come and gone, as had the next. Once again the sun rose over the streets of DC but this time it awoke a city on lockdown, shops abandoned, no cars or people on the streets, only hospitals, pharmacies, clinics, and police and fire stations seemed to be up and running.

The CDC was now confident that they had the outbreak fully contained and that all they had to focus on was treating the victims. For the original group of victims today was the day they completed the aggressive antibiotic protocol. Hopefully this meant that their systems were clear of any detectable amount of live Y-Pestis bacteria, which would mean that they could be moved out of quarantine and out into the regular ICU…hopefully… If that didn't happen at the forty-eight hour mark then the prognosis would be much worse, likely permanent lung damage, which carried with it risks of oxygen deprivation and subsequent brain damage, or possibly even death…

The team arrived early, to wait for Reid's verdict. As they entered the hospital waiting room, they found Maeve sitting curled up in a ball on a chair with her arms around her knees, obviously having been crying. Her jade-green eyes were red, puffy, and tear-filled. It was obvious that even though she'd been released from observation she still hadn't gone home. Her long, dark, reddish-brown hair was frizzy and appeared slightly unkempt as if she had fallen asleep on the sofa in the visitors' lounge.

Morgan sat down beside her.

"Have you heard anything yet?" he asked.

She shook her head nervously. "No… not yet… I wish they'd hurry up and tell us already. All this waiting is driving me crazy…"

"Oh trust us, we know…" JJ told her.

As the group waited, they watched the seconds tick by on an analog clock on the wall, each one seeming to last for ages. Tension, worry, and anxiousness hung heavy in the air between them.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Dr. Kimura came out to talk to them, she was smiling, beaming even…

"Normally I would ask, but I think I know who we're all here for…" she said.

"….and….?" several of them asked in unison.

"Is he gonna be ok?" Garcia asked, saying directly what everyone knew they were all asking in their heads.

"And…he's going to be alright…" she said at last.

This was met with a small roar of celebration and relief. When it died down she continued…

"Now the keyword here is GOING TO BE, right now he's no-longer infectious, the last blood test came up negative… but he's still very sick, and very weak. From now on it'll be up to his own body to heal itself, repairing the internal damage and clearing out the toxins released by the Y-pestis while it was still alive and that will take time… another three to five days in here, and then he'll go home; but when he does he still won't be even close to fully recovered. In total I'd have to give it three to four weeks from now, more likely closer to four, before I'd even think about releasing him to return to work."

"We understand…" Hotch said.

"Can we see him?" Garcia and Maeve asked in unison.

"Right now he's being moved out of quarantine and into his own room in the regular ICU, but soon, once we get him settled you can go in… just be quite, try to keep it on the short side please, at least with all seven of you in there at once… we don't want to push him right now." Kimura replied. They all nodded.


	11. Karma is a Bitch

Forty-five minutes later, they filed in one by one. The only sounds in the room were the slow steady beeping on the pulse monitor and Reid's breathing. He had regained a faint hint of color already though he was still as pale as death. There was an IV in his arm, the same one that had been delivering the antibiotics for the last two days. Kimura had explained that he would stay on the streptomycin for some time yet because plague had a habit of coming back weeks, months, or even years later and to make sure that didn't happen they needed to be sure that they had killed off every single Y-pestis bacterial cell in his body. They had to make sure that there was absolutely no chance, at all, of a relapse.

At first it seemed like he was asleep but they hadn't been in there long before he opened his eyes.

"G…u…y…s…?" he said

"Hey Spence…" JJ replied.

"How are you feeling?" Maeve asked.

He pushed a button on the bed's remote control so that he didn't have to starin himself to look at them instead of the ceiling.

"I've had w-worse days…" he said. "I…can't remember any…right now… but I'm sure…I've had worse…I'll be alright…"

"Are-are you sure about that?" Garcia asked nervously.

"Garcia…I'll be fine…I'll bet… I'll even be back…in a week…maybe two…"

"Reid…" Hotch began. "I do not need to see you… I don't _want _to see you in the office until you're cleared to come back. Just get work out of your head and take care of yourself for once. That's an order. Are we clear?"

"Yes sir…" He replied.

Hotch didn't want to press the issue, sure that Reid couldn't handle the stress of an argument in his current condition, but he didn't really believe that Reid had any intension of obeying his order. In fact he was quite sure that Reid would attempt to come in, a week or more ahead of time, and he was even more convinced that Reid would try to keep tabs on any and all investigations they handled while he was on medical leave.

Suddenly a look of panic crossed Reid's face. "Wh-what happened to the other victims? Who did this? Did we catch them?"

Moran put his hand up in a stop motion. "Whoa, Whoa, Whoa… slow down, easy… most of the others should be ok, it was Chad Brown's brother, and yeah we got 'em… it's all been taken care of…just calm down…"

The panic disappeared and Reid took several hard, deep breaths. "Do we have any idea why he did this?" Reid asked.

"It was revenge for Chad's imprisonment…" JJ replied.

"Great…so it's my fault…" Reid said.

"No. No. Reid, just no. This is not your fault. It's not your fault that this creep, this jackass is just as screwed up inside as his stupid brother!" Garcia exclaimed. "Now, now they can get their brotherly love on as they rot together in prison."

He laughed at that.

It wasn't long before a nurse brought him a tray of food, but he didn't touch it, in fact the others noticed fairly quickly that he wouldn't even look at it but no one said anything. Eventually the others left him and Maeve alone together.

"Spencer…aren't you going to eat that?" Maeve asked.

"I'm not hungry." He replied.

"Spencer, you haven't had anything to eat or drink since that glass of orange juice almost three days ago." She reminded him.

"I'm just not hungry…" he said. "Besides…it's hospital food…"

"Hospital food is still food and I'm pretty sure that being on the road all the time you've eaten worse…"

"No…ok maybe…"

"You just don't want to be here at all do you? Not as a patient anyway…"

"Not really… the harsh lights hurt… they won't leave me alone…"

"Word of advice… you want to get out of here? Eat something…"

"You're not going to let this go are you?"

"Nope, and neither will they…"

"Fine…hand me the Jell-O…"

"It's a start…" she said as she handed him to cup of strawberry Jell-O.

Meanwhile Finn Gorman had almost picked his way out of his handcuffs. They thought they'd beaten him, but no. There was still a way. He would break out of here, run to his lab, get another sample of his creation and release it in that asshole's hospital room. In his weakened state he'd be dead in a few hours at most! It was brilliant!

Soon he heard a click, he was out… he snuck out of the FBI by hiding in plain sight, hiding his face from the cameras and pretending everything was perfectly normal.

Then he got into a taxi cab and rode to his house. The entrances and exits were covered by bio-safety gray zones and crime scene tape but the house appeared to be left unguarded. So he went in…

He slowly climbed down the rickety wooden staircase toward his basement lab. Nothing appeared to be out of place, but knowing that the FBI had been to the house made him nervous. He punched in the security code on the large, air tight, metal door that maintained negative pressure in the room behind it. The door swung open automatically. He went inside and stepped cautiously over the cabinet where he kept his spore samples, he opened it, removed a single vial of his deadly creation, then he took out a light bulb from an open package on the shelf next to the cabinet, he walked over to his lab table, carrying both very carefully. When he stood directly in front the lab table, he realized that he'd walked right into a trap, the alarm was set off, and the door slammed shut and locked from the outside. He dropped the vile in his hand and it shattered into tiny pieces, its contents now airborne in the air around him. He was trapped and most likely now infected with pneumonic plague. He ran for the door and frantically punched in the emergency override code, it didn't work. He ran over to the phone and found it was disconnected. He took out his cell but outgoing calls were being jammed.

Twenty miles away, Garcia sat alone in the cafeteria at Bethesda while Morgan was getting his food. She heard her cell phone ping, telling her that the trap she'd secretly laid for the Unsub had worked.

_Ha! _She thought silently. _That's what happens to people who mess with my family. Enjoy Hell sicko…_


	12. Thrown for a Loop

***just to let you guys know, I updated my profile page and put all my CM stories in chronological order complete with the link for each one**

A few days later, Finn was dying painfully in quarantine, an unforeseen mutation rendered the antibiotics totally useless on him. He would be dead before they got the chance to charge him with anything.

Meanwhile, Reid was slowly starting to recover and although he was still hardly eating, he was ready to be disconnected from the IV and go home. There was just one stumbling block in his way, the fact that he technically lived alone. As long as he still ran the risk of passing out or collapsing, hitting his head on who knows what, Kimura didn't think it was a good idea to send him home just yet unless there was someone who could be there to keep an eye on him in case that happened.

Maeve was at Mendel, talking to the head of her department about taking some personal time so that he wouldn't have to stay there any longer.

The head of Mendel University's science department was a man by the name of Dr. William Colman, but those who worked under him preferred to call him The Head Hunter, he was plump old man with dark, tiny, beady blue eyes and fast-receding white hair. Whenever Maeve had seen him he had worn a mean-looking scowl that she was starting to think was permanently etched into his face.

His office reflected his personality. White and stainless steel everywhere Maeve looked, sterile, cold, removed, and uncompromising.

She sat down nervously in the white swivel chair in front of his desk.

"So you want some time off?" he said.

"Yes…Sir…"

"Just how long are we talking about Dr. Donovan?" He asked.

"Two weeks…Sir…" She replied.

"May I remind you that it has been less than a year since you returned to us from a ten month long sabbatical?"

"I haven't forgotten Sir… it's just that…" she began.

"Just…what? Dr. Donovan…what's the occasion this time and it better be good…and where were you all week? You're friends covered for you but I watched the security footage. You haven't made an appearance on it since the Saturday before last…"

"Sir, I called. My boyfriend has been in the hospital all week, and I was way too concerned for him to focus on much else. Now they want to release him but he lives alone and they really don't want him to be alone. I need a couple of weeks off so that I can get him out of that place. Besides, its not a huge deal if I'm not in the lab for a little while…"

"Perhaps not, but what about your clinical shifts down in the hospital?"

"I'll get someone to cover for me…I'll get one of my friends to cover for me…"

"You? You have friends? Hahaha!"

"Hilarious Sir…" She replied sarcastically. "But in all seriousness, yes, I have friends…" _It's not really that hard when you're not an uncaring slave driver to everyone. _She added to herself. "And I _will _get them to help me out with this."

"If…IF you can find someone to cover for you…you can have the time off… but this better be the last time you ask for something like this all year, this boyfriend of yours better be damn worth it." He said, glaring back at her, obviously annoyed, though whether he was annoyed by her taking the time off or by his inability to convince her not to, was unclear.

Furious and, at this point, barely able to contain the overwhelming urge to slap him, Maeve got up, left his office, and went down to see her friend Megan, in her office.

Dr. Megan Hunt was a neurologist by specialty, but she also carried a BA in human genetics which she was working on turning into a PhD. She was a short woman in her late forties with long red hair, a round face, and deep-set blue eyes. She had been Maeve's very best friend since the first time her turn had come up to work a shift down in the hospital.

Maeve found her in her office, finalizing recent records.

"Are you busy?" Maeve asked.

Megan looked up from her paperwork, saw Maeve and put down the file she was reading.

"No…this can wait a little longer, what's up?"

"I need a favor…" Maeve told her with a pleading look in her eye, trying not to crack as the stress of the past week was dangerously close to breaking through her outward appearance of calm.

Megan's mind lit up with both interest and concern. In the nearly 12 years they had known each other, Maeve hadn't asked for many favors.

"Maeve…What's this about?"

"I need you to cover my clinical shifts for a little while… possibly up to two or three weeks..."

"Ok, what's going on…?"

"Um… you remember Spencer right?"

"After you guys have been together over a year now I should hope so, what about him…? Does this have anything to do with the fact that I filled an order from Bethesda for roughly two weeks' worth of Cobalt Thyrosine…?"

"Um considering the really don't keep much of the stuff on hand…probably…" She replied.

"What. Happened." Megan asked sharply.

"Two words, pneumonic plague…"

"Oh my god… Maeve… I had no idea… is he…is he ok…?" Megan asked.

"He will be…Bethesda wants to release him, but they don't want him left alone for too long yet so I was going to stay with him…but the Head Hunter upstairs said I had to find someone to cover my shifts…"

"I can help you there, just leave it to me…"

"Thank you…so much…."

"Please Maeve… I'm your friend…. This is what friends do…"

Maeve smiled and went back to the Bethesda, where she found Spencer grudgingly forcing himself to nibble on some toast.

"Hey…"

"H-Hey…" he replied quietly.

"How are you feeling?"

"About the same…no worse but…"

"But Kimura wasn't exaggerating when she warned us this would be slow…" She finished.

"Yeah…"

"Well…you hate dry toast on a good day, so I take it that's for my benefit?"

"Not exactly…" He said.

Maeve gave him a questioning look.

"Do you remember a few months ago when I took you to my family reunion?"

"Oh…like I could forget…when you and your cousin warned me that your family was like the corner of genius and insanity, you two weren't kidding…"

"Well…my grandmother is here…how on earth she knew is beyond me…but she did…"

"What? How? Why?"

"She makes it a habit to know things she shouldn't have any way of knowing… trust me, nothing gets passed that woman…nothing."

"But Mt. Bedford to here is like a ten hour drive…it was nearly double that by train….Why would she come all this way?"

"Well…my head isn't at its clearest yet…but if I had to give her a rough profile… I'd say that after 60 years, three grown kids and five grown grandkids, all of whom she very seldom ever sees anymore… she relishes the chance to be useful…"

Maeve nodded.

"How'd it go with your boss?"

"Dr. Colman is a giant pain in the rear…but thanks to Megan being willing to cover my hospital shifts, he let me take it…"

That's when Maeve's phone rang, after letting loose a small, exasperated growl, she stepped into the hall to answer it. According to the caller ID it was Megan. More than likely this wasn't good…

But it wasn't Megan on the other end… it was Dr. Ethan Gross who worked alongside Megan the vast majority of the time.

"Ethan…are you calling me from Megan's phone?"

"Maeve…hey listen…please don't kill me…" he begged.

"Why would I kill you?"

"Because I'm calling to tell you that Megan was just in car accident… she'll be alright but she'll be out for at least a couple of months…which means not only can she not cover your shifts, but we need you to cover hers…"

"Please tell me you're kidding…" she replied.

"I wish I was…"

"Ok, well then… I have to go…"

She hung up and went back into Spencer's room. As she did he looked at her questioningly.

"Well that was about the worst news I could've gotten…"

"Why…what's going on?"

"Looks like I don't get the time off after all… at least…not all of it… I don't need to go into my lab…but the shifts I pick up down in the hospital are another story…something came up and Megan can't cover them, actually now I have to cover hers… so I guess it's a good thing Penny decided to show up…"

"Yeah…I guess…"

"Look… I know she can be more than a little overbearing, and I know how much you don't like anyone worrying about you…but unless something changes in the next hour, she's probably the only way you're getting out of here. Besides, I'll still be there as much as I can…ok?"

He nodded.

Meanwhile the Unsub was actually beating his creation with his own immune system, the results of his most recent two blood tests showed that he was going to make it….


	13. Not the Answer We Were Looking For

By the next morning it became clear that Finn wasn't just going to survive, he'd already beaten the infection and was recovering alarmingly fast; something that no one was happy about.

The team was in the visitor's lounge at Bethesda to ask Dr. Kimura how that could be.

"How is he doing this?" JJ asked. "I mean, Spence can still barely even stand and this guy could actually be back at 100% by next week…"

"I don't know," Dr. Kimura replied. "It shouldn't be medically possible. The only thing I can think of is that somewhere in that lab he had an antidote hidden, one that does for him what the Streptomycin couldn't do for any of the other patients…"

Barely a half hour had passed before Morgan was interrogating Finn once more, this time from his hospital room at Bethesda.

While it wasn't killing him as they had silently hoped, the plague had obviously done a number on him, he was pale, his eyes were red from sleep deprivation… all in all he looked more like a half-drowned rat.

"How are you recovering this quickly? You weren't even supposed to survive…" Morgan asked.

"I guess I'm just stronger than the others…stronger than your friend anyway…" he replied.

Morgan rolled his eyes.

"See I don't think that's it… I think that when you created this thing, you also created a cure more powerful than streptomycin as an insurance policy… and I think that after you dropped that vial you used it on yourself before we got there…"

"So what if I did?"

"So you'd better tell me what it is or what's in it… see either way you'll never see the light of day again… but since you're apparently so bent on preserving your own miserable life; I think you'll want to avoid the death penalty… and much as I don't want to… if you answer my questions so we can use your little backup plan to help all the people you hurt…I just might make sure that happens…" he offered.

Meanwhile Maeve was driving Reid home. So far the ride had been almost silent. It was rare with her, for him to be so quiet, even considering that he was still hoarse and, though he tried to hide it, sore inside and out… she tried to figure out why. Was he just that exhausted? Or was it something else…?

After they'd gone about a mile, she realized that she could drive herself crazy wondering why…so instead she just tried to think of something to say.

"So…does your building have an elevator…? She asked.

"Yeah but I've never used it…I always take the stairs…" he replied.

"Well when we get there we're taking the elevator…"

"Maeve are you sure that's a good idea?"

"I'm sure that you and stairs right now, is a bad idea… why would the elevator not be a good idea?"

"Because there are 6 elevator-related deaths per year!" he exclaimed hoarsely, finally starting to act like he had a tiny bit of energy back. That is until the comment started a coughing fit.

"It's barely going to be sixty seconds, you'll live…" Maeve replied once it had stopped. "But from the way you sound right now, going up two flights of stairs just might be the death of you… which is what this whole week has been about preventing."

"Ok, we'll take the screaming metal death trap…"

"I didn't know you were scared of elevators."

"I-I'm not…" he replied as the came to a stop at the traffic light on the corner of his street.

Maeve bit her lip in an attempt to conceal her heightened concern. It had been like this the past few days, there were times, usually when he hadn't moved or said much, that he would seem almost fine for a little while, only to be quickly exhausted and have the more noticeable symptoms either return or get worse again. One step forward and two steps back…

When they got there they took the elevator up to the third floor and when they came into his apartment they found that it more spotless than the day he'd moved in.

As they walked further in, Reid could tell that this had more than likely been his Grandmother's doing.

"Nana's been in here…" he said.

"Obviously…" Maeve said. "But how did she get in?"

"By using my spare key probably… I've kept it in the same place since I moved in, it wouldn't take her long to find it." He answered. Once again Maeve could tell that his voice was starting to fail and she noticed that he was shaking ever so slightly…

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"Yeah…little tired…I think the fever's back… but other than that I'm alright…"

"Spencer I'm not sure your fever ever actually left…dropped yes…left…probably not… either way you need some rest before you get any worse again…"

"Maeve this is the best I've felt in over a week…"

"Yeah but that's partly because you've spent the last week in bed… it's not going to last long if you keep this up now that you're home…" Maeve replied, but she realized that her words were falling of deaf ears, and not because he didn't want to hear it. She stopped short, standing behind him, watching his body sway back and forth where he stood. A second later he collapsed, it was all she could do to catch him before his head hit the floor.

That's when a short, elderly woman, of average build with hair died a dark red, came in behind them. Maeve recognized her instantly.

"Penny help me…"

The woman scurried over to them and bent down next to him.

"What happened?"

"He just collapsed…"

"So stubborn, always so stubborn…" she said, looking down at her grandson. "Ok, let's get him up…on three, One…two…three!"

They lifted Reid off the floor and supported him by putting his arms around their shoulders and from there dragged him down the short hallway and laid him on the bed.

"Thanks Penny, I'm not strong enough to lift him up like that by myself…" Maeve said.

"Neither am I, not anymore…" she said. Then she proceeded to take his shoes off and pull the blanket out from under him so that they could lay it over him.

Maeve looked at her questioningly.

"Let me guess…he felt better for a little while, probably at least partially fueled by adrenaline and coming down from that high he crashed fast and hard…" Penny continued.

"How did you know?" Maeve asked.

"Because he's my grandson, I make it my business to know these things."

Back at the hospital, Morgan was still trying to get Finn to tell him what his antidote was. He was starting to notice something, Finn seemed to be regressing, getting worse again… Morgan began to wonder if, whatever this antidote was, it was something one needed to keep taking which Finn no-longer had access to…

"Finn…you're still not answering my question…what did you use to get your strength back so fast…"

"Alright, FINE! I'll tell you…"

"I'm listening…"

"Dilaudid…I injected myself with Dilaudid…to keep myself strong and arm my body against the damage done by the Y-pestis… one does is enough…if you take it as soon as your infected, the bacteria can't do as much damage…if you take it after the infection has been wiped out it speeds recovery…but…in my case…it'll do neither…"

"What do you mean? Seems like it worked for you from where I'm standing…"

"Yes, and it would have if the antibiotics were working, it's still no substitute for streptomycin… I didn't design this strain to be anti-biotic resistant…I only meant for it to be more dangerous while the infection was present… which means that I'm going to die anyway…"


End file.
